Behold “Phone Life,” a video made by Ivan Cash that looks at the life and phone habits of two San Franciscans. One is Mathew, a fine artist and UX designer who lives without a cellphone, and the other is Tess, a 15-year-old who’s had a phone since sixth grade. Cash, who has contributed to The Bold Italic before, was nice enough to answer some of my questions about the project.
Cash is fascinated by people’s relationships with technology and met Mathew while conducting a separate social experiment in which he asked strangers to share with him the last photo taken on their phone. Funnily enough, Cash admitted it was hard to get a hold of the cellphone-less Mathew during the early stages of this project. The filmmaker says he isn’t trying to tech-shame anyone, but he does hope the video will inspire viewers to reexamine their own relationships with technology.
Cash’s other explorations of the physical and digital world include “Snail Mail My Email,” an art project where volunteers hand-wrote thousands of emails as letters and snail mailed them to their intended recipients. He describes the common thread in all of his projects as a curiosity about human connection, which is now so often mediated by technology.
It may be worth mentioning that Cash grew up without a TV, and his interest in unplugging is probably informed by that. He invites people who are inspired by this video to challenge their own phone habits by doing small things like waiting until they deboard a plane before turning on their phones, or hold off checking anything on their phone until after breakfast. These challenges might sound minor but they’re harder to pull off than you think. If you do try it out, please let us know how it goes in the comments.
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